Find and Replace the Specials

Ever find yourself working in MS Word and wishing you could run a quick find for nonprinting characters such as tabs, paragraph marks and section breaks? I mean, we all know how to use the Find / Replace feature to scan through a document for particular words, but how exactly do we tell Word to look for a thing like a section break?

I know that we could choose to display nonprinting characters, but that still wouldn’t give us the speed of the Find / Replace feature.

So, now what?

Well, the answer has been in the Find / Replace feature all along. You just have to know where to look for it!

To Find and / or Replace one of these nonprinting characters in MS Word, you’ll obviously need to begin by opening the Find / Replace Window. (Edit menu, choose either the Find or Replace choice or you could use Ctrl + F or Ctrl + H).

Now, we need to click the More button.

This will open the bottom half of the window and that’s where we’ll find our nonprinting characters.

At this point, click the Special button.

A list of options will be displayed. Simply choose what it is you’re looking for and Word will do the rest by filling in the appropriate code into the Find field.